Daily Archives: 2024-10-16

Google is preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android, just like Chrome OS

Posted on 2024-10-16 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: If this is reasonably high-quality it should be delightful. Termux, which is currently the best analog, is one of my must-haves, and their play store version (which ...isn't the one I use) is currently crippled because the whole point is that you can download and run software in the app, and google has been forbidding that for security and/or anti-competitive reasons.

Engineers at Google started work on a new Terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago. This Terminal app is part of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and contains a WebView that connects to a Linux virtual machine via a local IP address, allowing you to run Linux commands from the Android host. Initially, you had to manually enable this Terminal app using a shell command and then configure the Linux VM yourself. However, in recent days, Google began work on integrating the Terminal app into Android as well as turning it into an all-in-one app for running a Linux distro in a VM.

↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority

There already are a variety of ways to do this today, but having it as a supported feature implemented by Google is very welcome. This is also going to greatly increase the number of spammy articles and lazy YouTube videos telling you how to “run Ubuntu on your phone”, which I’m not particularly looking forward to.

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